Is HTC's handset a true titan of the latest Windows Phone offerings?

Jump to Section:

The HTC Titan II takes advantage of AT&T's 4G LTE network, but sadly, the network proved unreliable and underwhelming while used across the city of Chicago.

Websites often loaded slowly, reception dropped on multiple occasions while on an above-ground train or when 30 stories high in an office building, and the streaming music app Spotify yielded very long pauses between songs at times as the network struggled to stay sufficient.

Testing network speed numbers on a Windows Phone isn't quite as easy as on other handsets. No Speedtest.net app exists, while the website version is inaccessible due to Internet Explorer 9's lack of Flash support here. And the once-useful BandWidth app is now missing from the marketplace.

We tried the Free Speed Test app from the marketplace and recorded average download speeds in the 2-3Mbps range, with upload speeds around 1.5-1.8Mbps.

Internet Explorer 9

Even when connected to a Wi-Fi network, though, the included Internet Explorer 9 isn't one of our favorite mobile browsers. Pages render slowly and shift around as they load the last bits (much to your chagrin), and we experienced issues with images not loading properly on some sites.

Headlines on some pages appeared awkwardly enlarged, while elsewhere, the part of the page initially seen on the display looked fine, but scrolling downwards yielded issues with incompletely loaded pages and occasional glitchy results - so much so that the browser crashed at one point.

It's helpful to have the option to choose between defaulting to mobile or full versions of websites in the settings menu, though, and the settings screen also lets you pin individual websites to the home screen, access tabs, and scroll through and access favorites.

As noted above, Flash playback isn't an option on Windows Phone as of yet, which is disappointing, but not a situation unfamiliar to iPhone users. The third-party FlashVideo app in the marketplace allows playback and saving of Flash videos, but no official support has been released to date.